Signals Something new here—a weekly signal from noise, or at least I hope so. Connections drawn between things I have encountered… Something strange happens when we put a name to things. The moment “cassette futurism” or “Corporate Memphis” enters circulation, it stops being a loose collection of visual ideas and becomes a fixed category—something that can be sold, politicized, weaponized. This week, I kept encountering articles about the violence of naming: how aesthetic labels flatten complexity, how typographic choices become proxy wars, how compression algorithms create their own reality, and how AI’s expansion artifacts fill gaps with plausible nonsense. What unites these pieces isn’t just that they’re about design or technology—it’s that they all grapple with how the act of categorization itself changes what’s being categorized. Adam named the animals to establish dominion. Linnaeus classified nature to possess it. Colonial powers renamed places to erase their histories. Today,…
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